It seems like a pretty weird thing to do: publish a magazine that features only writers who live in the relatively small section of Toronto bounded by Bay Street and Ossington and Dupont and College. But maybe it isn’t so weird. It’s like a literary neighbourhood newsletter. It doesn’t look much like a newsletter, though. It’s glossy, like “Saturday Night”. It should be on 8 1/2 x 14 paper, photocopied and stapled in one corner. So how do you gauge a magazine whose mission is to publish stuff by people who live in one neighbourhood? Do you say, “Oh, well he definitely lives right inside the boundaries, so bravo!” Or, “Wait a minute, this guy lives two blocks east of Bay. Well that’s a big miss!” Okay, so I guess I’ll just have to do this on the basis of literary merit. To me, TC is symptomatic of something I see everywhere I look these days. It’s the literary scene in a microcosm. What I’m talking about is a kind of right-wing backlash, an over-reaction to all the literary excess that’s plagued the alternative scene over the past few decades. People are beginning to hunger for a good old solid narrative. And boy are the rednecks of solid narrative ever coming out of the woodwork. Out of eight stories in TC by eight different writers, only two show enough ironic detachment to get playful with the form – the stories by Niedzviecki and McCormack. (Yes, these two people are friends of mine, but why do you think they are my friends?) The other six stories are all traditional, and only one of these contains the subtlety necessary to make the traditional form sing. “Alice and Hazel” is ostensibly about a young woman’s experiences during Hurricane Hazel, her trip home in a car with her father during the storm. But the subtext, which rises gracefully out of the narrative as the story progresses, is about a father/daughter relationship, and a complex and interesting one at that. The other stories in TC are by people who seem to have no point other than to grace the world with yet another good ole yarn. TC is more like a sociology experiment than a lit mag. If the stories all seem to lean in a certain direction, you can hardly blame it on the editor, because with such a small territory to draw from, he’s probably publishing just about anything half-decent he can get his hands on. (KS)
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